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‘AI slop versions’ of books on retailers like Amazon ‘risk harming consumer confidence’
Low-quality AI books “risk harming consumer confidence”, the Publishers Association (PA) has said after comedian Rhys James shared online that he had found a number of “AI slop versions” of his upcoming memoir You’ll Like It When You Get There: A Life Lived Reluctantly for sale on Amazon.
The memoir will be published by Wildfire on 14th August 2025. In a TikTok post shared on 30th July, James shared that he had found the “AI slop versions of the same thing” – referring to his book – that “try and trick people into buying them by mistake”.
James then ranked the AI books by “how likely I am to accidentally buy them”. A number of books include AI-generated images of men on the cover, and the titles included Rhys Jones: A Comprehensive Biography – From Student to Standup Star; Rhys James: The Life and Legacy of a British Stand-up Comedian; Rhys James: The Untold Story of a British Stand-up Comedian; Rhys James: Crafting Laughter in a Changing World, and Rhys James: When Everything Said "You Can’t", He Whispered "Watch Me".
The books, which have now been taken down, were listed as £7.99 for an e-book and either £12.99 or £13.99 for a paperback edition.
The Bookseller also identified a number of other listings, such as JULIA BRADBURY: She Walked Through Pain; Found Power and Walk Her Own Cure, listed as a £7.99 e-book.
Like James, Bradbury – whose previous book, Walk Yourself Happy, was published by Piatkus in 2024 – also has a new book on the horizon, Hack Yourself Healthy, out with Pitakus in September 2025.
Similarly, former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s forthcoming memoir, Speaking My Mind (Sandycove) is scheduled for publication in September; The Bookseller also found an AI listing entitled LEO VARADKAR: The Rise, the Fight, the Silence — What Power Never Shows You.
There were also other titles published under usernames such as Ed Frank, FD Rollins and Sarah Williams, about Shirley Ballas, David Jason, Annie Lennox, Greg James and Ashley Roberts.
Reacting to the latest listings, Dan Conway, CEO of the PA, told The Bookseller: “AI is enabling a significant rise in the number of low-quality books available on online platforms. If this trend isn’t addressed there’s a risk this could harm consumer confidence which would be bad for publishers, retail platforms and book buyers. We are encouraging online retailers, such as Amazon, to be proactive about taking down low-quality content and developing their reporting mechanism to ensure consumers can have clarity about what they’re buying.”
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An Amazon spokesperson told The Bookseller that the company was investigating the named titles to check whether they abide by Amazon’s content guidelines.
Amazon said in a statement: “We have content guidelines governing which books can be listed for sale, and we have proactive and reactive methods that help us detect content that violates our guidelines, whether AI-generated or not.
"We invest significant time and resources to ensure our guidelines are followed, and remove books that do not adhere to those guidelines. We aim to provide the best possible shopping, reading and publishing experience, and we are constantly evaluating developments that impact that experience, which includes the rapid evolution and expansion of generative AI tools. We continue to enhance our protections against non-compliant content, and our process and guidelines will keep evolving as we see changes in publishing.”
Amazon also said it has previously lowered the volume limits the company has in place on new submissions from Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) publishers to help protect customers against abuse, and limit the publication of summaries and workbooks based on existing titles in the store, and said it has also introduced identity verification for KDP publishing in the UK.
Amazon emphasised that customers can use the "Report an Issue" section at the bottom of a book’s detail page on Amazon to report content customers believe is inappropriate for sale on the retailer’s website.
The Bookseller first covered this issue in 2022 after a number of workbooks and other publications that condensed or summarised copyright-protected content, based on newly published books, appeared on Amazon, published by what one user speaking to The Bookseller termed “leech publishers”.
The spate of “rip off versions of new books” was also identified by the Times, which highlighted that the listings “claim to give previews or summaries of the titles but actually offer only a few hundred words of poorly written copy”.
At the time, the PA urged consumer caution and said: “They are often self-published and seek to rip off the original version of the text to such an extent that those who buy them are left disappointed. In many cases they will infringe IP rights and exploit the hard work of authors across the world.”
